This Special Issue is supported by China Association for Science and Technology under Project of Promoting Publishing Capability of Chinese Academic Societies (2021). The Special Issue is open for submission till 31 December 2024. All submissions are welcome. 

July 2021 has witnessed historically rare, long lasting (> 3 days), and widespread extreme rainfall and severe flooding in central and northern China. This extreme event has left 302 casualties, and direct economic loss of over 100 billion yuan. Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan Province, received 201.9 mm of rainfall in just one hour on July 20, breaking the record for hourly rainfall rates in the China's land areas. From July 17 to 22, 39 cities in Henan logged rainfall measurements surpassing half of their annual totals, and 10 cities/counties observed rainfall over the 5-day period equivalent to that of an entire year. 

Big cities, as the concentrated places for all kinds of resources and socioeconomic activities on multiscales, have urgent and sophisticated needs for meteorological services, and also serve as the most rigorous testbed for these services. In turn, various factors such as increased exposure and vulnerability of meteorological disasters, combined effects of climate change and urbanization, and the initiative for development of safe, green, and smart cities, all present new challenges and opportunities for meteorological support services in big cities.

In recent years, the detection and attribution of extreme weather and climate events has been one of the most cutting-edge scientific issues in the field of climate change research. China has a vast territory and a large population density. The impacts caused by extreme weather and climate events are very serious. However, the current attribution research on major extreme events in China is far from satisfying the increasingly high demands of the public and government on the scientific community. This special issue will concentrate on reporting the most recent research results from studies of heat waves, persistent heavy precipitation, drought, and related compound extreme events in China. The special issue aims to reflect some of the latest developments in research on regional extreme weather and climate events in China, contributing to promote the climate change research in China.

Constructing Climate Data Records (CDR) from satellite historic data is a fundamental work advocated by the Global Climate Observation System (GCOS) programme. Since the launch of the first Fengyun (FY) satellite in 1988, we have collected FY satellite data with a 20-year-long record. Because of the upgrading of the instruments to the same category of instruments, the degradation of the instrument during its lifetime, and the unstable status of the data quality in the early commissioning stage, FY satellite data quality exhibits significant temporal and spatial variations. So far, the archived FY satellite data have never been reprocessed with the state-of-the-art sciences of calibration, cross calibration, and the product algorithms. As a result, neither Fundamental Climate Data Records (FCDR) nor Thematic Climate Data Records (TCDR) have been developed from FY satellites to support the user communities in data reanalysis, and climate and climate change research. In reprocessing the archived data, we need to analyze the historic data quality, characterize the spectral and radiometric response, trace the radiometric benchmark, and harmonize the observations from a series of FY instruments. This special issue will summarize the activities of FY satellite data reprocessing and introduce the current accuracy of FCDR and TCDR. We do hope that this special issue can promote the Chinese satellite data quality and advance their applications in data reanalysis and research on climate and climate change.